Pages

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

God is Superfluous Pierre-Simon Laplace quote

When doing my post a while back called 'God is Superfluous' I was searching around for this quote, and google wasn't helping me much because I had the wording wrong. Alas, I have found the quote that I was searching for. The quote comes from French Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). Laplace was giving a copy of his work Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) to Napoleon, who had been informed that it made no mention of god, and Napoleon asked Laplace "they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." and Laplace responded "I had no need of that hypothesis."

So it is with all of our natural models, they do not contain god in them, because they work perfectly well without the assumption of god.

I understand for the most part that we seem to be in a Godless universe, as we do not see or hear him or interact with him on a personal basis. One can kneel in silent prayer and assume to be in communion with the all mighty, but that cannot be good enough. It just simply can't be as it pertains to a deity. You would think he would play an active role with his creation. Even visiting on the fucking weekend would be fantastic. People could have something real rather than just blind faith. Blind faith, I feel, is a cop out. But on the other hand I do feel like certain questions do remain unanswered by the science community that do beg for something more than "random chance". They say it is ridiculous to ask what happened before the big bang, that it's like asking whats north of of the north pole. But that doesn't cut it either. If there is no abiogensis, then how, when no life existed, did substances come into being which are absolutely essential for life, but can only be produced by a life? All of the primordial soup necessary that we must "assume by faith", that it just spontaneously got there and made everything possible, had to come from somewhere, or something did it not? We do not observe something coming from nothing in the natural world but why are we supposed to suspend the laws of science for the big bang theory? I have come to the conclusion that both spontaneous generation of the building blocks for life (of which can only be produced by life) and a Creator God, are ultimately faith based propositions.

"spontaneous generation of the building blocks for life (of which can only be produced by life)"This is an unjustified assertion, and goes against current scientific understanding. Abiogenesis is not spontaneous generation, it might help to actually find out what something is before dismissing it so flippantly.